Direction

After years of rebelling against romance of any kind in my writing, I have finally given in. For the longest time, I didn't want to be seen as one of "those" writers. I didn't want to be chick-lit or romance novel-ish. I wanted to be respectable. I wanted to be literature.

I wanted to be taken seriously as a writer and have my stories mean something. Somehow in my mind I felt that being literary mean that I had to give up the things I enjoy (ie romantic love) to be replaced by grown-up plots and ten-dollar words. But I read romance novels, devour them actually, and I lap up any good love story. And stories don't have as much impact on me if they don't make my heart sigh.

So why do I consider these authors and books to be serious literature, but not my own?

And that's when something clicked in my sluggish brain. This deep rooted seed of romance sprang to life and my novel has a new purpose. The mental block lifted and I could clearly see the path Aden was to take to get to the happy ending. Just by accepting that two characters are meant to be (which in my head I knew, but never allowed to be acknowledged on paper), everything fit in place.